2D, or not 2D?
Hello everyone, Liam here.You haven’t heard from me yet because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in development work, but we’re reaching a really exciting point with Sunless Sea, and I wanted to tell you all about it.Building the game has been interesting. It’s got a lot of Fallen London in its DNA, but it is a very different beast all the same. We’re finding that every time we try something, there’s always the chance it won’t quite work as you’d expect it to. There are games a bit like this out there, but a lot of it is unique to Sunless Sea, so we’re feeling it out constantly.On top of this, Unity3D is changing and improving all the time, and that’s good news for us because it means we get to take advantage of new benefits when they are introduced. Sometimes though, it can mean making a decision to stick or twist on an approach you’re taking if Unity3D suddenly introduces a new technique.The biggest of these ‘stick or twist’ choices that we’ve been faced with came up when Unity 4.3 introduced a fully-integrated 2D workflow. Up until this point, we had been using Unity to make a 3D game, but basically ignoring and coding around a lot of the 3D-centric stuff (z-axis, who needs one of those?). When we read about the changes Unity 4.3 introduced for 2D game production, we found there were a lot of advantages. Collision detection was done in 2D, it allowed for better optimization for 2D games, the workflow was vastly improved. It should have been a clear choice to switch to using 2D.Except that it wasn’t, because we had already developed a very significant proportion of the game with the 3D tools. It was going to be a big decision, weighing up the work it would take to convert our code and assets over to 2D against the faster workflow we would be able to enjoy and the performance benefits.In the end, we moved over to 2D, and we’re all glad we did. The game runs more smoothly than ever, textures are rendering better than ever and, most importantly for us, it has sped up asset creation tremendously. Work that took 30 minutes is now taking 5, switching out artwork for islands, creatures and boats is now straightforward where it used to be a painful process. That is really important for us, being able to make alterations easily. We’re constantly playtesting, calculating if a piece of terrain is fun to steer around, if the distance between the islands feels right. A fortnight ago, we essentially trebled the dimensions of the map because we felt everything was a little close together. Using placeholder art that we can swap out once we’re sure that it’s playing the way we want it to means we can keep refining the experience without having a negative impact on our development time.
It does mean that it currently isn’t the prettiest thing to look at, it must be said. Paul does texture up island assets and replace the placeholders every now and then, and it’s a pleasant experience to be sailing through a sea of floating grey blocks only to meet a beautiful bit of terrain, covered in glittering lights. Sailing around is slowly starting to become a nice experience for me as we get closer and closer to the finished product.
The placeholders are starting to disappear, the game is starting to look the way we want it to, now we’re happy that it is playing the way we want it to. It’s an exciting time to be exploring the Unterzee.